queen bee

New Bees, New Style

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We’ve had a lot of issues with keeping the hives leveled in the backyard, so we tried something new before our bees’ arrival We threw down some gravel and some cinderblocks, threaded the wooden posts through, and BAM!

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Next, we used that hand tiller to uproot all of that grass. It was a pain in the back, so we only did the bare-minimum before Katie’s birthday electric tiller showed up.

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Why all the tilling? Well, it’s time to say goodbye to grass back here. Dan’s crazy bee attack last year was triggered by the lawn mower, so we figured we should do our best to avoid that.

Besides…clover is prettier and easier to manage.

We are throwing down a layer of topsoil and then sprinkling it with a million clover seeds. We’ll let you know how that goes.

School 46

We also have 2 colonies at School 46 for our future Beekeeping Club:

We picked up these honey bees from Hungry Bear Farms

If you are interested, visit our YouTube videos where I introduce the bees to our students!

As with all our other hives, we plan to check on these every 7-10 days.

Interesting Fact: 2 out of 4 of these hives are currently queenless. Eek!

2019 – The season of doom

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2019: Uncatchable swarms

See the top of that tree? That’s how high they went. Every. Time.

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For the first swarm, we called Chris Veazey who climbs trees for a living. He graciously climbed this pine tree covered in poison ivy and with no bee jacket.

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Alas, they re-swarmed across the street while he was attempting to remove them. Huge kudos for the effort.

We had a total of 7 swarms (that we know of) with every one of them completely out of reach. While swarms are a “good” and “natural” thing, it didn’t help us much. We replaced 3 queens, but they weren’t able to recover.

2019: A new allergy

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Dan has had some ridiculous reactions to bee stings; especially if they got him in the foot. It would turn red and swell up like a balloon for days. On one special occasion, while mowing the lawn, he got attacked – his face turned red, he had trouble breathing, and he puked on the way to our (thankfully super close) doctors’ office. He had his first ambulance ride to the emergency room at Strong where it was confirmed he was in anaphylaxis.

I was ready to quit beekeeping because I prefer he not die, but instead, he started going to an immunologist for weekly bee venom injections. These are 97% effective in preventing allergic reactions and they are currently reduced to one shot per month.

2019: My first year doing this:

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Do you see her? I found her, smushed her with my hive tool, and watched her insides come out.

 

I replaced her with a “nice” queen immediately after.

 

We were able to extract about 10 gallons of honey in July and absolutely none in the fall. The hives were so weak after all the swarming that I combined our hives into 4. I treated them for mites, made sure they had enough food for the winter and closed shop for the season.

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Dan got this extra gigantic full-body bee suit for Christmas to prevent the girls from sneaking in for a complimentary sting.

He also promises to wear shoes AND socks in the backyard from now on.

 

 

 

2020: An adventurous year so far

Screen Shot 2020-04-12 at 6.53.22 PMI gave them a bunch of sugar patties to make sure they were still well fed and hoped for the best. A month later we were down to 2 hives. A week after that, 1 hive.

And then last week, this happened:Screen Shot 2020-04-13 at 11.01.32 PM

IMG_2789So, so, so, lame. This is the first year since my first year of beekeeping that I lost 100% of our colonies. Three hives appear to have died from mites, and one died from humidity/mold.

Some positive things:

  • We completed our first course in the eCornell Master Beekeeping program and start our next course next week
  • We sold out of honey thanks to our amazing neighbors
  • Without honey, we were able to expand a little and sell lip balm and bath bombs
  • We’ve made some new friends
  • Our new set of bees will be arriving soon

Interesting fact: Our amazing health insurance, which I am forever grateful for, is the only reason that we can afford both immunotherapy and EpiPens, and therefore continue beekeeping (for now).

 

Bee Updates

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Yes, I’m a slacker with blogging!

But that doesn’t mean we quit the most expensive hobby. I’ll give a list of updates and then try to remain consistent throughout this season.

1. This has been a very successful year with honey and lip balm sales. We’ve really  gotten to know more of our neighborhood, which is awesome!

2. The lip balm container problem may have been resolved.

3. Mighty Mite Thermal Treatment is our current attempted method for dealing with mites.

4. We went into winter with 6 hives and entered spring with 3.

5. We did another on-site presentation with some of our neighborhood children.

6. We attended the annual Geneva Bee Conference.

7. Two more package bees were purchased and we briefly had 5 hives.

8. One of our hives that swarmed (quite an event that I’ll write about another day) actually absconded.

9. With 4 hives left, another one swarmed- much too high to catch.

10. For the first time, we purchased a queen.

11. With 10 queen cells brewing (as potential replacements for that last swarm) several hive splits were attempted.

12. More than anything, we really want to figure out queen rearing. $$$

13. We’ve decided to enroll in the eCornell Master Beekeeper program.

Here’s a little swarm video:

Interesting Fact: Our hive that absconded? That was the last of the mean-queen descendants, so we are glad they left.

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Honor thy queen

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Our new Carniolan queen has been accepted! We named her Queen Ruth.fullsizeoutput_a5dWe made this 2 minute visit only to remove the queen cage. Every time we go into the hive and mess around with the frames, we set the worker bees back a few days.

Within this time we were able to see that Queen Ruth is busy building her brood. Her ladies are hard at work and have already filled up some honey frames in the second deep super.

Interesting fact: Queen bees can lay up to 1500 eggs per day.

Package bee installation

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Have you wondered how new beekeepers get bees in the first place? Many people have asked if we just set out some boxes and hope to lure them in. If only it were that cheap and easy!

In previous years we installed nuclear colonies, or nucs, which we can talk about some other time. This was our first time getting package bees. Occasionally you might find a company that will literally mail these to you for pick-up at a local post office. Most likely, the postal workers won’t appreciate it. We ordered these through a local business and picked them up in Canandaigua last Saturday afternoon.

The package bees came in a well-ventilated plastic box. Within this box was a can of sugary syrup, 1 caged queen, and 3 pounds of Carniolan bees.IMG_0031First, we followed the advice of several YouTube videos and sprayed the box down with sugar water. This helped the bees concentrate more on eating and cleaning each other off rather than attacking a potential enemy.

Next, we removed the can of sugar water and searched for the queen cage. This is what it looked like when we found it. The worker bees either really like her already, or they just want to eat the sugar candy.

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We picked out a mostly empty frame from last year and strapped on the queen cage with a rubber band. There is “candy” inside that hole you see at the top of the cage which keeps the queen inside. The worker bees will eat the candy, and will eat their way through it until they come face-to-face with the queen. The idea here is that they are given time to get to know her highness, and will hopefully respect her enough to accept her as their queen.

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Next came the fun part. We turned the box over and shook them out of the package until the majority of them were in the deep super. It took a lot of shaking- you’d almost believe they wanted to live in that plastic box forever.IMG_0040

We plan to quickly open up the hive this weekend so that we can remove the rubber band and queen cage.

Here is a link to a very brief video of the seemingly violent shaking that had to be done to get the bees out of the package.

Shaking in the bees

Interesting fact: Carniolan bees are more prone to swarming, so this should be fun.

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God save the queen

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We did the spring inspection before picking up our new girls today. I knew they were active, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well they were doing. Those are some worker cells in the top left of this first photo. Can you find the queen?

fullsizeoutput_a4fThere she is! She is seriously beautiful. Look how all of her workers are doting on her.

fullsizeoutput_a51We had to pick up our package bees this afternoon, which meant we needed to clean out one of our dead hives. I chose this one. This is what it looks like when a colony starves over the winter.

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Starvation causes them to drop directly to the bottom board. What was extra gross about this one, is the hive was tipped back a little due to the ground settling, and water gathered in the back of the bottom board. The scent of dead, moldy bees was absolutely foul. They sure had enough honey- in fact we are extracting honey from a few of the full frames they left behind. This was a weak colony, and I was not expecting them to survive.

Interesting fact: I did not get stung today, but I should have with all the time I spent harassing them.

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